A while back I had an epiphany:

I can do it. I can buy all the chocolate and candy and chips I want. I can do it today, I can do it tomorrow and I could do it forever. I’m an adult now.

As a kid, I ate a lot of Junk Food. I ate a lot in general but when it came to junk food I didn’t hold anything back. I didn’t understand why other people were all polite and took a chip at a time when it would run out before they got to their third.

It’s all about survival to me; do you want to eat the most or barely get a taste in?

No I wasn’t starved of junk food at home, it just never lasted. I always wanted more and if there was none left it felt like I was stranded in a desert until we did our next round of grocery shopping. We’d by a weeks worth of junk food and it would last 2 days, max 3.

What can I say, we loved junk food.

For a while I actually thought we were too poor for junk food because we’d hardly take junk food to school. And I thought we didn’t have much at home because I spent the better part of a week junk food free.

Then I realized it… my brothers are just a bunch of pigs with 0 self control.

Mind. Blown.

That said, while I lived in a shroud of ignorance thinking my parents didn’t buy us enough junk food, I would tell myself that when I was old enough I would buy all the junk food I wanted, when I wanted and no one could stop me.

Fast forward to highschool and university life, I have a credit card and I do nothing with it. I’m too intimidated to use it because I think I’ll do something wrong – I know, bet my dad thought I was just super responsible. I just could never do it even when I had cash; brown mode level extreme –  must save all the money I don’t have. Save, Save, SAVE.

But seriously, I though it was a waste to buy junkfood because it was so unnecessarily expensive at school [and it still is]. I had a feeling I’d also end up buying copious amounts if I ever started too so I stayed away as long as I could.

It started with starving, hunger. I get insanely hungry and very quickly that hunger literally makes it impossible to move. It’s not a joke, I’d struggle to sit up and eat sometimes and my brother’s were always weirded out by it. To their defense… I did look HELLA weird. But anyway, eventually I started buying food and a couple months in I realized I was buying a little too regularly to call it curbing my hunger. I was buying just because I could sometimes even if I could survive in time to get home and eat.

I had to somehow put a stop to this but I realized I couldn’t realistically stop it but I could manage it. For me, the fact that I wasn’t working and I was using my dad’s money to buy this food definitely encouraged me to better manage and keep track of what I was spending because less be completely honest here – my primary expenditure is food, it’s always been food.

So I set a limit and it worked.

$5/week when I’m not working and $10/week when I am. I know, that sounds like nothing. I’ve heard that a lot but it’s my way of making sure I’m not eating too unhealthy in school and I’m not spending without cause. Keep in mind, I drink coffee or hot chocolate maybe once ever ~2-3 months. My go to snacks at school are usually a bagel or ruffles [mostly ruffles…it’s an addiction I’m working on] with other stuff in between occasionally.

For the most part this works really well for me, there will be weeks I go over my limit and I’m not super anal about it [I’m so chill and hip and cool I know]. It’s just a guide but it keeps me in check and makes me feel like I have my shit together when I don’t have a lot going for me.

That said, let’s real it back in; I’m an adult and I don’t by copious amounts of junk food on the daily.

I’m genuinely still surprised by it.

I have all this power to spend, spend, spend on all the stuff I want but I’m not. I am an adult now.